Almost everyone outside of Microsoft country is using open source in their development, but that doesn't mean it comes easy.

We've seen proof positive of that this week. First, my friendly fellow reporter Stephen Shankland reported that Red Hat has decided to revitalize its free, community Linux, Fedora, by—drum roll please—opening up the project.

What's that you say? Isn't the code already open? Well, yes, it is, but Red Hat manages the project, and it's never put enough resources into it. The result was that non-Red Hat open-source developers were discouraged and contributed relatively little to it.

It sounds like Red Hat has learned the error of its ways.

To make Fedora more open-source friendly, Red Hat will be opening up the Fedora source code CVS (Concurrent Version System) so that programmers can see what's in the code before it's released. Eventually, they'll be able to approve at least some CVS code submissions.

In addition, Red Hat will turn over maintenance of some software packages that aren't part of the Fedora Core operating system to non-Red Hat developers in a program called Fedora Extras. This is not related to the University of Hawaii's Web site, Fedora Extras, which supports Fedora. Read more...